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Trump has every emotional right to think his re-election was stolen.
That said, it is time to move on and do the things that will insure the defeat of Radical Democrats in the next two elections.
Is he mature enough to do that or will he continue to obsess?
On the other hand if Biden and Radical Democrats are allowed to federalize elections Trump will have been more than justified in being concerned because belief and trust in America's elections will have ended.
Stay tuned.
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Three poignant editorials:
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Politics over national security:
The Debt Ceiling Deception
Biden gives away the real reason Democrats won’t use the budget bill.
By The Editorial Board
Democrats keep telling Americans they have the votes and a mandate to pass the biggest tax increase since 1968 and the biggest domestic spending bill ever. Yet they also claim they’re helpless to raise the federal debt ceiling without Republican votes.
It’s a preposterous position, albeit of the sort this Administration often tries to sell. Such as: The soaring number of illegal border crossings in Texas is merely “seasonal,” the Afghanistan withdrawal was a success, and the cost of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is “zero.”
Yet the White House is sticking to the line that the minority party is at fault for the majority party’s failure to raise the limit. The press-office wizards rolled out President Biden on Monday to portray the GOP’s reluctance not to cooperate as “so reckless and dangerous,” along with the usual parade of potential horribles: a credit downgrade, a run on the dollar, and a potential default on U.S. securities.
“So let’s be clear: Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, they’re threatening to use the power—their power to prevent us from doing our job: saving the economy from a catastrophic event,” Mr. Biden declared. “I think, quite frankly, it’s hypocritical, dangerous, and disgraceful.”
But no one is preventing Democrats from doing their job. The Democrats can pass anything they want in the House. In the Senate they have 50 votes, plus the Vice President, to pass anything budget related through reconciliation. The GOP can’t filibuster such a budget bill—a fact Democrats are counting on to pass their multi-trillion-dollar tax and spending binge.
The parliamentarian has already said that Democrats can use reconciliation to raise the debt limit, so why won’t they do it? As it happens, Mr. Biden gave that game away when he was asked Monday why Democrats aren’t using reconciliation.
“There is a process” that “would require literally up to hundreds of votes,” Mr. Biden explained. “It’s unlimited number of votes having nothing directly to do with the debt limit; it could be everything from Ethiopia to anything else that has nothing to do with the debt limit. And it’s fraught with all kinds of potential danger for a miscalculation, and it would have to happen twice.”
In other words, Mr. Biden admits that Democrats could raise the limit via reconciliation, but then they’d also have to take difficult votes on many issues on the Senate floor. Some of those votes might be unpopular. Mr. Biden is admitting that the reason is political—that Democrats want Republicans to spare them from having to take those tough votes.
Now we know why Kate Bedingfield and her White House media team keep the President under wraps. He might blurt out an inconvenient political truth.
Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats are betting that if they blame Republicans loudly enough as the day of debt reckoning arrives, the GOP will cave and give Democrats the political cover they want. But why should the GOP do so when Democrats have blocked Republicans from any role in the monumental spending bill?
If Congress fails to raise the debt limit, the Democrats who run both ends of Pennsylvania Ave. will be responsible for the consequences.
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Facebook as previously noted, must be slapped down.
Facebook Needs to Empower Parents, Not Censor Political Speech
The company wants to appease politicians but it should worry more about users.
By The Editorial Board
Facebook has become the latest company that everyone loves to hate, and internal documents stolen by an employee have become an opening to blame the social-media giant for America’s ills. The company has made mistakes, but it’s worth sorting the genuine issues from the opportunism of politicians looking to censor opponents.
Both were on display Tuesday as Frances Haugen, the former employee who leaked the documents, testified on Capitol Hill. One of her legitimate concerns is Facebook’s negative influence on the mental health of teenagers. It’s no surprise to parents that teens are emotionally fragile and especially vulnerable to peer and celebrity influences.
Ms. Haugen’s documents show that Facebook understands its impact on teens but has done little about it. According to its internal research, 82% of teens experienced emotional issues in the last month, including poor body image, anxiety and depression. More than half who experience anxiety, family stress and loneliness said they use Instagram to distract from their feelings. One in five U.S. teens said Instagram made them feel worse while 42% said it made them feel better.
“Teens not satisfied with their lives are more likely to say [Instagram] makes them feel worse than those who are satisfied,” a Facebook slide-deck notes, and “being in a low or vulnerable state of mind means teens are more vulnerable to the content they see online.” Many teens don’t have close friends or mentors they feel they can turn to for support.
This is a problem that can’t be solved by government, though some politicians want to try. They’ve proposed eliminating Section 230 liability protection for algorithms or requiring Facebook to submit its algorithms to regulators for review. Just what we need—a Bureau of Algorithms.
A better idea is to give users more control over their news feeds and parents more control over what their kids are exposed to online. Tech companies overall have resisted giving parents more control over what their children see online, and social-media apps are especially unhelpful. Here’s where Congressional pressure could do some good.
Too bad the main concern of many politicians is prodding Facebook to censor “misinformation.” Ms. Haugen seems to agree, and it’s notable that her appearance seems to have been midwifed by Bill Burton, a prominent Democratic communications executive. Facebook is “facing a Big Tobacco moment, a moment of reckoning,” said Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Democrats have seen that bludgeoning CEO Mark Zuckerberg and threatening the company with regulation has been working. Mr. Zuckerberg resisted censorship for some time, but in recent years Facebook has begun to add opinionated “fact-checks” or has censored stories that disagree with progressive orthodoxy on climate, Covid or other issues. Our op-eds have been targeted more than once.
Facebook makes money by targeting ads, so it naturally has an incentive to feed users content that keeps them hooked. But the company has also become a political scapegoat for the deeper-seated cultural problems that its platform can amplify. Congress ought to be examining ways to empower social-media users and parents, rather than bullying Facebook to exercise more control over user speech.
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THE FBI has become on of our most corrupt federal agencies:
The FBI’s Other Secret Warrant Abuses
More evidence that the bureau abuses the FISA court process.
By The Editorial Board
Congress has failed to reform federal surveillance laws, despite the FBI’s 2016 abuse of a secret court to spy on the Trump presidential campaign. The latest report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the FBI’s other surveillance abuses is more evidence of the need to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Mr. Horowitz’s 2019 report found the FBI had gulled the FISA court into letting it spy on former Trump aide Carter Page by presenting false information. The scandal inspired the Horowitz team to conduct a broader audit of FBI compliance, and the results are damning.
The FBI must abide by what are known as Woods Procedures that include a file supporting every factual assertion in a warrant application. As the IG notes, surveillance warrants are among the Justice Department’s “most intrusive investigative authorities” and must be “scrupulously accurate.”
The IG’s preliminary look last year into a sample of 29 wiretap applications said the FBI couldn’t locate Woods files for four applications, and the IG found errors in the remaining 25. As last week’s full report explains, the FBI and Justice have since acknowledged the 29 applications contained a total of 209 errors. These range from typographical (38) and date (42) errors, to unsupported facts (17), misidentified sources of information (15), and deviations from source documents (93).
The IG also found 209 examples in the 29 applications of the FBI failing to provide “adequate documentation to support factual assertions.” In all “there were over 400 instances of non-compliance with the Woods Procedures.”
Most alarming are the four errors that DOJ and the FBI admit were “material”—serious enough to have potentially changed the FISA court’s determination of “probable cause” to issue a warrant. The errors related to three applications in which the FBI omitted important or relevant information about targets, or provided outdated or unverified facts.
In response to the IG’s preliminary findings last year, the FBI reviewed more than 7,000 FISA applications from January 2015 to March 2020, and the IG reports that for 183 of them “the required Woods File was missing, destroyed, or incomplete.” This is supposed to be America’s premier law-enforcement body.
The IG criticizes an FBI culture that believes it is above the rules, and he devotes an entire section to spanking its leadership for its reaction to the 2020 preliminary findings. While FBI director Christopher Wray instituted some reforms, the agency minimized the findings with statements that “appeared to display a tolerance for error.”
No one has taken responsibility—including Mr. Wray, on whose watch many of these mistakes happened. He has proposed more reforms to the very (Woods) reforms instituted 20 years ago to improve FBI behavior. Sure.
Introducing the Constitution’s independent Article III judges into intelligence collection in the executive branch was always a mistake, as we wrote in the 1970s. The system dilutes accountability for wiretaps, letting the court and FBI blame each other for mistakes and political abuses like those in 2016.
Congress should abolish the FISA court and return authority to the law enforcement leaders making surveillance decisions. Then hold them accountable, including jail time for abuses.
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It was China all along:
Science Closes In on Covid’s Origins
Four studies—including two from WHO—provide powerful evidence favoring the lab-leak theory.
By Richard Muller and Steven Quay
Where did Covid-19 come from? The answer can be found in the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself. To get to the truth, we need only unleash the power of science.
Based on experience with SARS-1 in 2003 and MERS in 2012, we know that many people are infected by a host animal long before a coronavirus mutates to the point where it can jump from human to human. An extensive data set from late 2019—more than 9,000 hospital samples—is available of people exhibiting flulike (thus Covid-like) symptoms in China’s Hubei and Shaanxi provinces before the epidemic started. Based on SARS-1 and MERS, the natural zoonotic theory predicts 100 to 400 Covid infections would be found in those samples. The lab-leak hypothesis, of course, predicts zero. If the novel coronavirus were engineered by scientists pursuing gain-of-function research, there would be no instances of community infection until it escaped from the laboratory. The World Health Organization investigation analyzed those stored samples and found zero pre-pandemic infections. This is powerful evidence favoring the lab-leak theory.
Within months of the SARS-1 and MERS outbreaks, scientists found animals that had hosted the viruses before they made the jump to humans. More than 80% of the animals in affected markets were infected with a coronavirus. In an influential March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen and co-authors implied that a host animal for SARS-CoV-2 would soon be found. If the virus had been cooked up in a lab, of course, there would be no host animal to find.
The WHO team searched for a host in early 2020, testing more than 80,000 animals from 209 species, including wild, domesticated and market animals. Not a single animal infected with SARS-CoV-2 was found. This finding strongly favors the lab-leak theory. We can only wonder if the results would have been different if the animals tested had included the humanized mice kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A coronavirus adapts for its host animal. It takes time to perfect itself for infecting humans. But a pathogen engineered via accelerated evolution in a laboratory using humanized mice would need no additional time after escape to optimize for human infection. In their Nature Medicine paper, Mr. Andersen and colleagues pointed to what they considered the poor design of SARS-CoV-2 as evidence of zoonotic origin. But a team of American scientists mutated the stem of the coronavirus genome in nearly 4,000 different ways and tested each variation. In the process they actually stumbled on the Delta variant. In the end, they determined that the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was 99.5% optimized for human infection—strong confirmation of the lab-leak hypothesis.
SARS-CoV-2 contains a key mutation: the “furin cleavage site,” or FCS. This mutation is sufficiently complex that it couldn’t have been the result of spontaneous changes triggered, for example, by a mutagen or radiation. It could, however, have been inserted by nature or by humans. In nature the process is called recombination—a virus exchanges chunks of itself with another closely related virus when both infect the same cell. The National Institutes of Health database shows no FCS in more than 1,200 viruses that can exchange with SARS-CoV-2.
As the Intercept recently reported, a 2018 grant proposal—written by the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit, and submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa—contained a description of proposed experiments that would involve splicing the FCS sequences into bat viruses so a research team could look for changes in infectivity. Darpa opted not to fund the grant, but the absence of the FCS in related coronaviruses, together with the apparent desire and capability of scientists to make such an insertion, strongly argues in favor of the laboratory origin thesis.
Based on the scientific evidence alone, an unbiased jury would be convinced that SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus escaped after being created in a laboratory using accelerated evolution (a k a gain of function) and gene splicing on the backbone of a bat coronavirus. Using standard statistical methods, we can quantify the likelihood of the lab-leak hypothesis compared with that of zoonosis. The odds enormously favor a lab leak, far more significantly than the 99% confidence usually required for a revolutionary scientific discovery.
The WHO is launching yet another investigation. Why? The studies have been done. The research exists. As in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” the crucial evidence is already in plain sight, if only they would look. Let China keep its firewall of secrecy; a suspect who refuses to testify can still be convicted. We have an eyewitness, a whistleblower who escaped from Wuhan and carried details of the pandemic’s origin that the Chinese Communist Party can’t hide. The whistleblower’s name is SARS-CoV-2.
Mr. Muller is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Quay is founder of Atossa Therapeutics and a co-author of “The Origin of the Virus: The Hidden Truths Behind the Microbe That Killed Millions of People.”
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Paul is an old friend from my Atlanta Days:
The Woke Left’s Primitive Economics
Zero-sum thinking was adaptive in a world of tribal conflict, but isn’t in a modern society.
By Paul H. Rubin
Karl Marx called his system “scientific socialism.” Modern leftists advocate a similar ideology and call themselves “woke” to indicate that they understand the world better than the rest of us. Yet the worldview of Marxists and woke leftists alike is fundamentally primitive.
Folk economics is the economics of people untrained in economics. It is the economic view of the world that evolved in our brains before the development of the modern economy. During this period of evolution the economy was simple, with little specialization except by age and sex, no economic growth, no technological change, limited trade, little capital, and warfare between neighboring tribes.
Zero-sum thinking was well-adapted to this world. Since there was no economic growth, incomes and wealth didn’t grow. If one person had access to more food or other goods, or greater access to females, it was likely because of expropriation from others. Since there was little capital, a “labor theory of value”—the idea that all value is created by labor alone—would have been appropriate, and there was little need to protect capital through property rights. Frequent warfare encouraged xenophobia.
Adam Smith and other economists challenged this worldview in the 18th century. They taught that specialization of labor was valuable, that capital was productive, and that labor and capital could work together to increase income. They also showed that property rights needed protection, that members of other tribes or groups could cooperate through trade, that wealth could be created with the proper incentives, and that the creation of wealth would benefit everyone in a society, not only the wealthy. Most important, they showed that a complex economy could work with little or no central direction.
Marx’s economic system was based on the primitive worldview of our ancestors. For him, conflict rather than cooperation between labor and capital defined the economy. He thought that the wealthy became rich only by exploiting the poor, that all income came from labor, and that the economy needed central direction because he didn’t believe markets were good at self-correction. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the largest and most expensive social-science experiment ever conducted, proved Smith right and Marx wrong.
Members of the woke left want to return to policies based on this primitive economic thinking. One of their major errors is thinking that the world is zero-sum. That assumption drives identity politics, which sees, among other things, an intrinsic conflict between blacks and whites. The Black Lives Matter movement and Critical Race Theory foment racial antagonism and resurrect xenophobia. Leftists vilify “millionaires and billionaires” like Bill Gates and Elon Musk as evil and exploitative. They should recognize them as productive entrepreneurs whose innovations benefit us all.
Dislike of the rich makes sense in a world where one can become rich only by exploiting others, but not in a society full of creativity and useful inventions. Changing tax laws to soak the rich makes sense with a labor theory of value, but not with a sophisticated understanding of continual investment and technological change.
Adopting counterproductive woke policies such as racial job quotas, high taxes, excessive regulation of business, and price controls on some goods may not send us all the way back to the subsistence economy of our ancestors. But if policies that penalize saving and investing and that involve excessive government control are adopted, social capital, wealth, and real income will decline. If we bow to this primitive ideology, there will be increased racial animosity and conflict, slow economic growth, and fewer inventions.
What is particularly sad is that young people, the main advocates of woke ideology, would suffer the ill effects of these policies for the rest of their lives.
Mr. Rubin is an emeritus professor of economics at Emory University. He held several senior positions in the Reagan Administration. His most recent book is “A Student’s Guide to Socialism: How It Will Trash Your Lives.”
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Scheller released but still gagged:
Imprisoned Marine Freed, Legal Struggle Continues
Lt. Col. Stu Scheller — the Marine officer who rose to fame for a viral video demanding accountability from military leaders for failures in Afghanistan — has been released from the brig as his legal case moves forward.
In an email statement to Military.com, Marine Corps spokesman Maj. Jim Stenger confirmed the officer was being released Tuesday “as a result of a mutual agreement between Lt. Col. Scheller, his defense counsel, and the commanding general, Training Command.”
However, a source with knowledge of the situation said that Scheller remains bound by a gag order that bars him from social media. On Aug. 26, he posted a video that went viral of himself in uniform demanding accountability from senior military leaders following a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops in Afghanistan that same day.
Scheller’s case now will move to an Article 32 preliminary hearing, which has yet to be scheduled, to consider whether charges should be recommended to his command. Those potentially could include contempt toward officials, willfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer, failure to obey lawful general orders, and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.
Read more at Military.com Set featured image
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Biden was billed in a most fraudulently way and the voters bought the message:
An Ethically Challenged Presidency
By Doug Mills/The New York Times
There should be little doubt that President Biden was not being truthful when, days after the Taliban’s victory, he told ABC News that his senior military advisers had not urged him to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The president’s claim was flatly contradicted last week in sworn testimony from Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command.
During the generals’ testimony, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, sought to defend her boss by pointing to a line in Biden’s interview in which he appeared to suggest that the military’s advice “was split.”
Another whopper. What split? As The Times’s Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David Sanger reported in April, right after Lloyd Austin was sworn in as secretary of defense in January, he and his top generals “were in lock step in recommending that about 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan.” Asked whether there were top military advisers who argued otherwise, Psaki evaded the question.
Biden’s dissembling, regarding the worst-executed major foreign policy decision in years, would be a scandal in any presidency. It’s worse coming from the man who campaigned for office by insisting that he stood “for honor and telling the truth.”
A week earlier, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger published a scrupulously reported book on the Biden family. It makes a compelling case that some of the most explosive emails from Hunter Biden’s purported laptop were entirely genuine — a claim that Schreckinger confirmed with multiple sources, including a Swedish government agency, and that was never explicitly denied by Hunter himself.
That includes a 2017 email in which one of Hunter’s potential business partners proposed a “provisional agreement” with the now-defunct company CEFC China Energy to share equity percentages in a new venture, with “10 Jim” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” Jim Biden is the president’s brother. “The big guy,” according to Tony Bobulinski, a recipient of the email, is Hunter’s father.
This does not mean the president received, or even expected to receive, money from this supposed venture, or even knew about it.
But it provides good reason to believe that the news media gave far too much credence to his assertion that the leaked emails were “a Russian plant,” as he put it in his second debate with Donald Trump. It makes it more difficult to ignore Bobulinski’s claim that he met with Joe, Jim and Hunter Biden in May 2017 to discuss the overall terms of the deal. And it is worth asking whether the president may have been willing to make himself useful to his family, even if he didn’t profit personally or directly from their deals.
“The Bidens pride themselves on integrity, and are fond of pledging ‘my word as a Biden’ when they really mean something,” Schreckinger writes. “The evidence marshaled in the closing weeks of the campaign built on a picture in which Joe’s relatives trade regularly on their connections to him, while the separation between their private dealings and his public duties is not as far and wide as he has claimed.”
All this would be bad enough if it were just history. But what are we to make of Hunter’s recent venture as a visual artist — a field in which he has no formal training and no commercial track record?
In case you missed this: A SoHo gallerist intends to sell 15 of Hunter’s works at prices of up to $500,000 apiece. To safeguard the propriety of these transactions, the White House has issued “ethics guidelines” that are supposed to keep things aboveboard by hiding the identity of the buyers from both Hunter and the White House. And it falls to the gallerist — that is, the person who stands to gain from the commissions — to police the guidelines by rejecting suspiciously lucrative offers.
It screams of a scam. “The Treasury Department warned last year that the anonymity of high-value art transactions could make the market attractive to those engaging in illegal financial activities or people subject to U.S. sanctions,” The Times’s Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported in July.
In another report of dubious activities, Mattathias Schwartz wrote in Business Insider about emails that indicated that in 2015, while his dad was vice president, Hunter was allegedly exploring a $2 million-plus “success fees” deal with two Democratic donors to help recover Libyan assets that had been frozen as a result of U.S. sanctions. The effort came to nothing — Hunter’s reputation for hard living didn’t help — but at least one of the donors was attracted to Hunter’s offer because he is “son of #2 who has Libya file.”
“When it comes to opening doors in Washington,” Schwartz notes, “the illusion of access can be as valuable as hard currency.”
Some readers may be inclined to dismiss this as merely an indictment of a troubled son. They might ask themselves what conclusions they would draw if this were about, say, Eric Trump. Some readers will also think it isn’t the president’s job to police his adult son. But it is his job to ensure that Hunter and other relatives don’t profit by trading on his position in government.
That would be corruption. The president will have to do better than give us his “word as a Biden” that he’ll put an end to it.
And:
It ain't Joe running the show:
It ain't Joe running the show:
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Who's running the show? It Ain't Joe as John Kerry lets the truth slip | |
Headline: Who's Running The Show? Kerry Tells French TV Biden 'Literally Not Aware' Of International Spat The First take: We would like to say we're shocked... we're not. | |
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Two brain bleeds now Biden hemorrhaging in the polls. Bless his heart.
The Virginia Governor's race could be telling, with respect to the Mid Term, if the current governor loses as is a growing possibility and particularly so if Biden campaigns for him as is planned.
New Poll Shows Biden Is ‘Hemorrhaging Support’ Among Critical Voter Demographics
A poll from the Associated Press-NORC depicts Biden’s approval rating standing at 50% while the disapproval rate is at 49%. This poll described Biden’s approval rating at 59% in July and has tanked 10 points since then. But the more important thing to worry about here is the vote of the independent voters that will define whether or not Biden gets to keep the White House.
Among independent voters, the approval rating for Biden is at 38% now, meaning it has hemorrhaged 20 points. It was 62% independent voters approving of Biden’s job just two months ago. Not only this, the number has gone down among Democrats as well. Among them, the approval rate, which was at 92% in July, has gotten all the way down to 85%. The number has also cratered from 86% to 64% in Black Americans in just two months. The situation was attempted to be softened by AP, who characterized the drastic decrease in numbers as having dipped somewhat.
Trying to cover up the bad news for Biden, AP tried to cover up the situation by blaming Former President Trump in his story. According to his report, the people having mixed feelings about Biden’s performance stated in follow-up interviews that Biden was still preferable over Trump. Biden had to deal with a pandemic-stricken country, which started during Trump’s presidency, followed by the Afghanistan withdrawal, which was also initiated under Trump. Lastly, the economic crisis is not to be blamed on Biden as the tax cuts by Trump happened to tilt in favor of the wealthy corporations. A health care worker from Atlanta, Acarla Strickland, said that Trump had a lot to do with the country’s progress. Though she did vote for Biden, she now feels lukewarm about him.
And:
Senator Barrasso Says Biden Has Succumbed To Pressure From Democratic Hard-Line Radicals
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) had some forthright comments for Joe Biden to consider over the weekend. He appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to say that the president has been captured by the most radical leftist elements inside the Democratic Party. Barrasso noted that Biden is “neither competent nor a centrist.”
The ongoing meltdown among Democrats over Biden’s “Build Back Better” spending package has “sunk” the president, according to Barrasso, and could put the bipartisan infrastructure bill already approved once by the Senate on a “long pause.”
Barrasso compared Biden’s trip to Capitol Hill on Friday with an episode of The Twilight Zone. He said that Biden set out to get the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by the House but instead “surrendered to the radical wing” of his party.
Lawmakers present at Biden’s closed-door meeting said that he pitched a budget reconciliation bill costing $1.9 trillion to $2 trillion as a compromise measure if the House would vote immediately to approve the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. The current proposal for the reconciliation bill carries a price tag of at least $3.5 trillion, and many hard-left lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) consider that number far too low.
By Saturday, Biden was publicly admitting his frustration over Democrats standing against his plea for a reduced spending bill that might lead to the passage of the infrastructure bill. While he refused to lay out a new timeframe for passing either bill, he said he would “work like hell” to get both passed at some point.
Barrasso said that Biden is now a “man overboard and he cannot swim,” who is “sunk.” He said that Americans are “feeling less safe” under his presidency because of increasing inflation and the ongoing immigration crisis playing out on the southern border. He added that Biden is now being forced to “walk the plank” for Bernie Sanders’ “socialist budget.”
The continuing holdout further tears Biden on the spending bill by moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Manchin is so far refusing to budge on his insistence for a smaller budget reconciliation spending bill of around $1.5 trillion.
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This author claims no insurrection on Jan. 6, and Trump did not insight a riot. It was a protest against government policies that became raucous.
When you have a mass media that sides with one party and is no longer faithful in reporting in a straightforward manner they are ale to sway impressions. Sixty percent still get their news and impressions from mass media reporting.
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Roger Kimball 
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